Home Rental Service Users By Region, Q1 2014 [CHART]

Airbnb represents a rapidly growing niche of the accommodations market. According to a report by GlobalWebIndex, 8% of internet users in North America and 14% worldwide had rented rooms or apartments through a home and lodging rentals service in Q1 2014.

Though US business travel use of Airbnb is currently a small portion of the more than $280 billion in spending forecast for 2014, expenditure is on the rise, driven by unmanaged business travelers and forward-thinking corporate travel departments. Mike Hilton, executive vice president at Concur, a company that processes $50 billion worth of corporate expense reports a year, told the San Francisco Chronicle that use of Airbnb had quadrupled every year since 2010, with the company expected to process $1 million of Airbnb expenses in Q1 2014. Michael Tangney, global travel manager at Google, told attendees at the 2014 PhoCusWright Europe conference that the company’s employees had spent $2 million on Airbnb rentals last year. Read the rest at eMarketer.